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Josh Marshall wants you to know that an unwillingness to keep and bear arms is a virtue

After all, he pays taxes for police and a standing professional army, does he not? He’s covered. So for him to get his hands dirty — and that’s what gun ownership is, a kind of uncouth, quasi-racist filth caked to the paws of those anti-commonsense gun-nut extremists we’ve been hearing from lately, who watch too many movies and fantasize about using their firearms to protect their families or communities (like that ever happens), or who think the 2nd Amendment is a check on government (like a government would ever turn on its largely disarmed people) — why, that’s just not who Josh is. He is above such tawdriness. Removed from such gauche, manual considerations.

Rather, Josh is proud that he, as a member of the civilized, educated class, has put the onus of protecting his family or community or even some nearby innocent from immediate threats in the hands of law enforcement and the military alone — often in contradiction to state constitutions, I might add, which either adopted or served as precursors to the USC for what comes to count as a militia, with distinctions being drawn between the professional militia, the ready militia (able males 17-45 and those who wished to become citizens) and the reserve militia (everyone else, including women and chilren). Or “the people,” all of whom were expected to defend the country should the need arise.

That is to say, Marshall is overtly proud that he’s surrendered his duty as a first responder for himself and his family and, in extremis, his community or nation, for the cheap grace of claiming no taint from the demon metal / polymer killing machine so fetishized by those who don’t recognize that arms are for hugging (and aborting fetuses), not for the pleasure or yahoos who believe themselves some bulwark against imaginary tyrannical evil. Besides, everyone knows the best weapon is an ostentatious new law coupled to a good, hearty Twitter sneer campaign. Drop bon mots, not bombs!

Yet, for all the posturing and the cheap grace expressed within the gun-free, beta male, anti-liberty manifestos of “progressives” like Marshall, what one finds at its heart is a sense of relief. That is, by openly disclaiming any responsibility to be a first responder for his family — and cloaking that abandonment of duty in faux moral rationales and attempts to shame those who would themselves resist such an ignominious surrender of a mandate implied by natrural law — what Marshall and others like him are hoping to do is forgive themselves in advance for their own cowardice, and to lay the blame elsewhere for any failure to keep themselves and their families safe, whether that blame be placed on slow law enforcement response times, or too many “assault weapons,” or magazines with large capacities.

It is a preemptive deflection of blame posed as a principled stand against “gun violence” — without acknowledging that “gun violence” that kills bad men, when perpetrated by good men, is not something we as a society should be aiming to curb.

Marshall muses that if the world were as safe with everyone armed as it is with no one armed, he’d choose the latter. Which, fine. Then we can all keep unicorns as pets, and the sky will open up in a burst of delightful hard candy. But rational humans would respond to such wishcasting by noting, for instance, that it was firearms that became the great equalizer, particularly for women brutalized by men, or for minorities hounded by supremacist groups who sought — like the modern-day progressive — to keep them meekly armed, if armed at all.

Making Marshall’s moral play a bit of revisionist nonsense that, at its core, is really just a plea for a beneficent police state.

Marshall and his cohort are fine living as slaves; their only insistence seems to be that they get the cushy room in the Big White house for so closely serving the master, and as a result are kept away from the field negroes who so repulse them. Like Uncle Toms.

Or, to take another tack, were Josh Marshall a country, he’d be Vichy France.

Look, I don’t give a rip if Josh Marshall wants to own a gun to potentially protect his family. Perhaps he feels he’s all thumbs and is more likely to blow his own loafer off than to ever repel a home invasion or some other violent threat. After all, it’s difficult mastering machinery that slack-jawed rednecks can sleep with without any fear, should the need arise.

But what I do find difficult to take is when that same effete beta-male, in order to justify his own cowardice, tries to make sure I’m in a state of unpreparedness right along with him. That he does this because he believes his other attributes then elevate him above the disarmed riff-raff just goes to show that in addition to being a coward, he hopes that he can legislate his way to becoming a procedural or legislative bully.

Which I predicted would be the tack taken by progressive Dems and ironically was met with scorn on Twitter and elsewhere. By, among others, Josh Marshall. I know. What are the odds, right?

Anybody else see where Matt Tabibi and the Rolling Stone just published the groundbreaking story that the bail out was a big fraud that only helped corrupt big business and actually fucked the country?

Yeah. Too bad the didn’t figure that out until after the election, huh?

Marshall muses that if the world were as safe with everyone armed as it is with no one armed, he’d choose the latter. Which, fine. Then we can all keep unicorns as pets, and the sky will open up in a burst of delightful hard candy. But rational humans would respond to such wishcasting by noting, for instance, that it was firearms that became the great equalizer, particularly for women brutalized by men, or for minorities hounded by supremacist groups who sought — like the modern-day progressive — to keep them meekly armed, if armed at all.

Didn’t somebody, a pro-gun liberal perhaps, do a blog post on just that subject? Something about guns making civilization possible in the first place?

“Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms, force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.”

“The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.”</blockquote.

In the first Whitehead recapitulates what the founder noted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Being classical liberals they prioritized the two forms accordingly – the First Amendment being persuasion, and the Second being force. In similar fashion this was also a nation founded on the notion of limited government, as government unchecked always poses the threat of force triumphing over reason.

The second quote really harks back to our true foundational document – The Declaration of Independence, something no absolute pacifist could ever envision, much less countenance, or (Heaven forfend) actively promote.

I can only explain Marshall as one of those people Hoffer described in True Believers – someone who wishes to be freed from the burdens of freedom. His presence in this nation is an accident of birth.

For most of the time humans have existed the entire planet was a “gun free zone”. I am not in a sweat to return to those times when the biggest, strongest, and meanest prevailed over those who were weaker. Thank God for the likes of Sam Colt and John M. Browning leveling the playing field.

Over 20 years ago, I described to my colleagues the way I reacted – in a rather direct manner – to inappropriate attention being paid to my wife by an acquaintance. With one exception, my colleagues said they wouldn’t have done anything under the circumstances, not because they regarded my acquaintance’s actions as appropriate. Instead, they self-righteously said things like, “Well, I guess I just trust my wife more than you trust yours,” “I don’t think my wife as a possession that I need to keep from being stolen” and “I respect my wife too much to do something that might embarrass her like that.”

In response, I told them, “That’s the great thing about being a liberal. You can always concoct a rationalization for the fact that you really just don’t have any balls.”

My BIL and sister reguarly have a table at the local gun shows and this weekend was no exception. When I talked to them yesterday they said the crowd was huge, prices were insane, and people were more than willing to pay them.

I am feeling somewhat optimistic because of all the new shareholders in the Second Amendment. However, I’m also a little apprehensive because it seems that some progs, by continuing to demonize gun owners and push for more restrictions, are hoping for some kind of Reichstag Fire.

“He doesn’t seem to realize that the world is full of wolves who love tasty sheep.”

Sure they do. They just don’t think of themselves a “sheep”.

“In their fantasy, once their fascist Utopia comes into being they’ll the ones holding the whip.”

The truly committed don’t see a need for weapons with the exception Teh Authorities. Delusional projection wrt human behavior. Humans are what, (and who), they are, because of the violence inherant to their nature. Denying reality doesn’t change reality one whit.

The Marshall’s of the world have this fantasy that they can get a 911 call off and get a police response in time when something bad is happening. Mostly the police respond to calls like that in time to break out the body bags and chalk.

“Josh Marshall is a sheep. He doesn’t seem to realize that the world is full of wolves who love tasty sheep.”

I’m guessing that Josh sees himself as a wolf (of the intellectual elitist variety – clearly he thinks he’s better than us) and sees guns as the one thing that’s keeping us darn “sheep” from having to live as he deems best for us. Useful idiots rarely see their impending fall after they’ve outlived their usefulness.

Josh is fortunate that he has a popular soapbox. That way, when bad things happen to him and his family, and the people he relies on for protection show up 10 minutes too late, there will be lots of people to hear his whining about how the system let him down.

Granted, he’ll whine about how the police department was supposedly short-staffed (ever talk to a police chief who thought he was overstaffed?) and it’s all the fault of his neighbors for not cheerfully doubling their property taxes…

Wasn’t Josh one of your sometime-commentors, Jeff? I remember Yglesias, but not sure whether Marshall was one.

As an aside, remember when some folks on the left were all mocky about how concerned Conservatives were about Iran and North Korea getting nukes? Everyone should be able to have nukes, apparently. But not semiautomatic weapons, because that would be bad.

Josh’s comments on how if people were equally safe with and without guns he’d choose without reminds me of the saying: “We all dream of a world of sunshine, happiness, and peace. The problems is… half of the people think it sounds like a wonderful place to live, the other half think it sounds like a wonderful place to pillage.”

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